Former World Bank Executive Director Moisés Naím

Who Needs a Band-Aid When You’ve Got a Stone in Your Medicine Cabinet?

Moisés Naím is the former executive director of the World Bank, the former editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, and was Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry in the early 1990s. An internationally syndicated columnist and a senior associate in the International Economics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he is the author most recently of The End of Power. Before talking about why power isn’t what it used to be, he sat down in the Zócalo green room to confess to the weirdest item in his medicine cabinet (a …

The Powers That Don’t Be

Moisés Naím Discusses Our Increasing Global Ineffectuality

Fierce contests for and enormous shifts in power are happening all across the world and all around us—whether it’s wars for control in the Middle East or shifts in power …

How To Stop Being Powerless

When Everyone Holds Sway, Nothing Gets Done. It's Time to Find Ways To Give Some People More Clout.

How can government give the ordinary citizen a voice and still get anything done?

In the 18th century, we began a long march of democratic empowerment. We struggled to free ourselves …

Don’t Feel Sorry for the Powerful—Yet

The End of Power

We frequently bemoan our incompetent leaders, but what if their shortcomings aren’t (all) their fault? When he became Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry, Moisés Naím found out firsthand that the …

Are U.S. Presidents Lame?

Untangling Whether the White House Has Too Much Power—Or Too Little

It’s routinely called the most powerful job in the world, but the U.S. presidency can seem astonishingly impotent. Ideas proposed in the State of the Union go nowhere once they …